As a new report highlights the grim reality of the 50,000 New Zealand women it calls “unhoused, unnoticed and unsafe”, Indepth reporter Gill Higgins investigates the story of one of those – Cheyenne of Tauranga – and talks to her sister Misty, who’s determined to help the sister she loves into a home of her own.
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Most of us are free to ignore the growing group of homeless people in New Zealand, but Misty from Hamilton doesn’t have that option. Misty is a young mum, but it’s not her children she’s worried about, it’s her sister, Cheyenne. She sees Cheyenne caught in a cycle of living on the streets, spending time in jail and moving in and out of mental health facilities. She’s worried that she’ll try to take her life again. It breaks her heart.
But with Cheyenne, 34, recently discharged from a mental health hospital in Hamilton, Misty, 36, sees a chance for change. She says Cheyenne is ready for a fresh start. “I feel and see as I spend more and more time with my sister that she wants change, she’s leaning on me which is something I haven’t seen since she was a kid.”
Cheyenne agrees, it’s time. “I want to start my life again, yeah, I just want to change my life”.
But essential to that is Cheyenne having a home to live in.
Cheyenne has a history of family trauma, addiction issues and mental ill health – the very elements identified in a report released yesterday in parliament about the chronic and growing issue of homeless women in New Zealand.
According to the report, 50,000 women define themselves as homeless. And it highlights bleak realities for those women such as opting to sleep during the day (for safety) and stay up at night (when public toilets and showers are often locked), as well as the struggles of managing issues such as pregnancy and menstruation without a home.
It also stresses the “interconnected” issues of past trauma, mental illness and addiction, and how they frequently serve as “both causes and consequences of homelessness”. Cheyenne has had a long battle with all three.
She has chronic schizophrenia which she describes as, “basically kind of talking to yourself and believing things and also hearing different human voices. It can be quite distressing”.
Regular and sustained medication is key to managing her situation. For that to happen, all the evidence points to Cheyenne needing wrap-around support in permanent housing. And that means closely monitored assistance immediately following hospital discharge, otherwise it’s all too easy for women like her to slip through the cracks – no address, no contact, no support.
‘She’s amazing, my sister’
The first time I met the two sisters Misty was picking up Cheyenne to take her out, a few weeks before her discharge. You could see how much Misty cared. And how much Cheyenne appreciated it. “She’s amazing, my sister, what’s she’s doing to help me, yeah she’s cool.”
But Misty has got to the point where she sometimes feels it’s impossible to help her younger sister. She says she only just found out that Cheyenne had been taken off the waitlist due to a lack of contact. “But she was on the streets, she had a mental health condition, she hasn’t had an address since 2019,” says Misty. Cheyenne is now back on the list.
Throughout New Zealand people like Cheyenne who have complex problems are finding themselves without a home or the support required to help them find one. The social housing situation in New Zealand simply can’t keep up with demand. The waitlist is currently about 20,000 long. While over 100,000 are considered “severely housing deprived”.
Misty, who has had her own experiences with childhood trauma, homelessness and prison, deeply appreciates her own home and the role it plays in helping mental wellbeing. “I have a clear mind. When you’re homeless you’re not able to think clearly because you’re always in survival mode.”
She feels frustrated in her quest to try to get Cheyenne what she needs to stop her from falling back into the same destructive life. “I feel like giving up.”
Helen Robinson who leads the Auckland City Mission has seen this scenario play out time and again. At HomeGround in central Auckland the Mission provides 80 apartments for homeless people with complex needs. “With the right support, anything is possible,” says Robinson. “If that support isn’t available then people remain unwell often.”
But even if Cheyenne was discharged to Auckland, Robinson says she couldn’t promise her a place. “I could have filled these apartments three times over the day this place opened.”
‘Housing people makes sense’
Professor Nevil Pierse is co-leader of He Kāinga Oranga – Housing and Health Research Programme. He calls our housing situation a “national tragedy” as providing permanent housing with support to those with complex needs makes sense for both the individual and the country. “If we invest now in getting somebody permanently housed, we don’t have to pay for that person to be in prison, which is about $110,000 a year. We have to pay less for hospitalisations that are about $4500 each. So from a financial point of view, it makes sense, from a moral point of view, it makes sense.”
But he believes the outlook is bleak. Although the Government has set aside $140 million for 1500 social housing places in the next couple of years, this is woefully short of the number needed to address that 20,000 long waitlist.
A ‘home’ of sorts
Weeks later, I get a call from Misty to say Cheyenne has been discharged to a private accommodation provider in Tauranga. It differs from a not-for-profit community provider, as it is simply a business that provides basic accommodation, rather than wrap-around care.
Misty says Cheyenne is excited because she’s expecting to have her own bathroom and kitchen.
The day after she’s due to move in, I meet Misty in a café with the plan to visit Cheyenne together at her new address. But Misty is worried. “Turns out there’s only a room and when she arrived there was no bed, no sheets, no food.” Misty wants us to head to the accommodation straight away to make sure Cheyenne’s OK.
We arrive at the address which is half old motel and half new cabins. A row of them are packed in side-by-side, big window fronts facing directly onto the old motel units. Kitchen and bathroom facilities, it turns out, are shared.
Misty calls Cheyenne’s name as it’s hard to distinguish one cabin from the next. But Cheyenne isn’t there. “She’s not OK, if she’s doing this,” she says. “She’s not OK”.
The owner of the accommodation, Kirk Vosper, is on site. He explains this set-up, which can house as many as 100 people, as “an experiment”. It used to be a motel, but he is now opening it up to people in need; some found their way there through advertisements on Trade Me, others had the connection made by WINZ or community groups such as The People’s Project.
“We don’t ask questions, so we take people from Corrections, from the hospital, from off the streets,” he says. Every tenant has an individual agreement with Vosper. “We have no social workers or anything,” he says. “We’re private landlords.”
This “affordable housing” differs from rapid rehousing or the three-month transitional housing offered by the the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Those programmes provide what associate housing minister Tama Potaka calls “tailored support services to help these households move into longer-term housing”.
Vosper says his tenants get a roof over their heads and a set of keys. But they don’t get any direct help, that’s left to support agencies.
This kind of stop-gap is no doubt invaluable, but the model does come with some problems. Understandably, Vosper has a responsibility to neighbours so the residents must comply with certain standards of behaviour. “If they fit in that’s great, if they don’t then they move on.”
As Misty says, “if Cheyenne stuffs up, she’s gone”. And that can be hard if you have a mental health condition and a history of addiction.
Vosper sees the project in its current state as being a good thing for the country. “We can do it [provide housing] way more efficiently than community housing providers.”
That’s no surprise as, by not offering support, Vosper’s model is much cheaper to run.
Where’s Cheyenne?
Misty believes Cheyenne has failed to meet us because she’s not coping with being among others with problems, and with a complete lack of support. She suspects she’s gone straight back to her old ways.
Over the next couple of weeks, Misty pieced things together. She spoke to Cheyenne on the phone. Cheyenne told her she’d gone drinking and had felt “ashamed”. But she was still trying to keep things under control. The lack of support was clearly a problem.
In her first two weeks in the accommodation, Cheyenne had no visit from any relevant agency. She says she was called by Community Mental Health who asked her to attend an appointment for her medication. But although she said she would go, she didn’t.
Misty says that’s par for the course for people who need help. “She can’t even cook, she can’t clean, she needs support for everything right now to learn to do that.”
Health NZ, Hauora a Toi Bay of Plenty explains that there are processes for people like Cheyenne. They get a needs assessment with a case manager, which determines whether they require residential support and access to additional support services. It admits the case manager hasn’t yet met with Cheyenne to complete this assessment but doesn’t explain why it’s taken so long. Misty says the support was needed from the start.
We went back to Health NZ, Hauora a Toi Bay of Plenty to ask why Cheyenne wasn’t assessed in hospital, before she was discharged. Pauline McGrath, group director of operations at the organisation responded: “This was an out of area referral, meaning the person was in hospital in another region and was then referred the community mental health services in Tauranga. This is why the assessment was not done in hospital. Had the person been in one of the hospitals in Bay of Plenty, they typically would have been seen and assessed by the community mental health team prior to discharge.”
She also said that, in Cheyenne’s case, “There were multiple agencies involved… so the referral process may have been more complex than usual, due to the differing processes of each agency”.
At HomeGround in Auckland, support is available from day one. The set up there is genuine permanent housing as any “stuff ups” are handled with the right support. There’s on-site help from a mental health nurse. There’s also a pharmacy, an addiction clinic, a GP, and a community support provider who will visit as often as needed.
Similar services are available from Auckland City Mission in a transitional (temporary) housing setting. For example, at Te Whare Hīnātore, the Mission takes into account the specific needs of homeless women who identify as wāhine. It’s run by women and has an assigned psychotherapist and psychologist to build up a relationship of trust. Residents have access to sessions to combat addiction, improve wellbeing and help with anger management. The set-up provides three meals a day and yes, they help the residents to learn to cook if they need it. They also give them chores so they learn to clean and to take on responsibility. Auckland City Mission says there is a real need for this kind of service given 50% of the homeless population are women and, as yesterday’s report confirmed, and over one third of those women are Māori.
A glimmer of hope
Misty and I visit Cheyenne again on a Monday two weeks later. Misty chose a Monday because it’s before the day Cheyenne picks up her weekly benefit, which means there’s a greater chance she’ll be there. And she is. She shows off her room. “It’s not where I want to be, but I do [want to be here] because I don’t want to be homeless.” She appreciates having a place to stay, but both she and Misty know her situation is unlikely to improve here.
Misty wants Cheyenne to be in a place where she won’t need to worry about her security, where she’s getting the right help. Only then will Cheyenne have the time and space and stability to take her medication as she should, and to work on beating her addictions.
According to a spokesperson for Health New Zealand, which is the Crown agency responsible for providing mental health residential beds in the community, there is a group of NGO providers in Tauranga that provide places to live with the kind of 24/7 transitional support Cheyenne needs.
“These are all via funded Mental Health support services by Health NZ, and the properties are leased or directly owned by the NGO provider. Tauranga does not have a waiting list for places outlined above.”
For Misty, one glimmer of hope is that community agency The People’s Project, which receives government funding, has told Misty it’s willing to add Cheyenne to its client list.
According to its website, the People’s Project has 106 active clients in Tauranga. Since 2018, it has helped 196 with housing outcomes. But it’s an uphill battle. Social housing in Tauranga makes up 2.8% of total housing, the average in New Zealand is 4%, while in the OECD as a whole, the average is upward of 12%. So the city relies on private rentals, a situation made harder by Tauranga having some of the highest rents in the country.
Still, for Cheyenne, it’s hope. The People’s Project stipulates that Cheyenne must “engage” for them to work with her. Misty is going to try hard to help her do that.
Because as Helen Robinson from the Auckland City Mission says, “for hope to be realised for Cheyenne, she needs something more and different from what she is getting at the moment”.
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